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Blogs
From James Chute at UT San Diego:
Mayor Bob Filner has appointed Denise Montgomery executive director of the city of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture. Montgomery, who held a similar position with the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, starts on June 12. She succeeds Victoria Hamilton, founding director of the 25-year-old commission.
Filner, before introducing Montgomery, outlined his vision for the arts, which he compared t o his vision for binationalism: “We want to infuse it into everything we do.” He said Montgomery was prepared to “ratchet things up,” and he expects her to join in his effort to have the arts and the arts commission assume a broader, more pronounced and important role in the life of the city.
The Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago has published the first issue of The Digest, its new online publication for the cultural sector. The Digest identifies important academic research that is often inaccessible — due to paywalls or jargon — and presents it in summary form for a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. It's available online at http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/digest/.
By Janet Brown from her blog Better Together
“Relevance” and “transparency” are two words I use frequently when talking with staff or board members of grantmaking and nonprofit arts organizations. Both are core values needed to foster arts participation in our communities and prosperity for artists and our organizations. This blog focuses on transparency...financial transparency.
From Allison Meier at Hyperallergic:
Despite the regular way it ticks by, time doesn't always seem to move at a logical pace. Days blur gradually from one to the next, yet it can also feel like years have escaped in a sudden flash. This paradox of time is central to Sprat Theatre Company's One Day in the Life of Henri Shnuffle, which is currently transporting audiences to the experience of time for the elderly.
From David Itzkoff, writing for The New York Times:
The director of the Detroit Institute of Arts said on Friday that he believed the museum’s collection was “held in the public trust” and could not be sold by the city to help pay down its multibillion-dollar debt, and that he expected the city’s emergency manager and his office to reach the same conclusion.
From Philanthropy News Digest:
Although program-related investments are becoming more popular with foundations looking to advance their charitable purposes while generating financial returns, their use remains limited, a new study by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy finds.
From Natasha Isajlovic-Terry for the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog:
Data is used in many different ways in the social sector. We know that nonprofits collect and analyze their data to measure the effectiveness of their services, and that strategic nonprofits use open data to better position their outreach and services. The same is true for foundations, but these applications are often conducted within the silos of the organizations. Data espouses positive effects when it is shared, or, to put it in more familiar terms, when we are transparent with it.
From Elizabeth R. Miller on Knight Blog:
Most of the world sees San José, Calif. as the capital of Silicon Valley, a creative tech hub drawing extraordinary talent to some of the world’s largest media companies like Google, Facebook and more. Yet the country’s 10th largest city faces significant challenges, including gaping economic disparity and a significant digital divide. Richard Florida, a leading intellectual on economic competitiveness, writes that wage inequality in San José, Calif. is the second largest in the country. We recently asked several of the community’s leaders from philanthropy, government and the arts what they see as their city’s greatest assets and biggest challenges.
Arts Education Partnership, a national coalition of more than 100 education, arts, business, cultural, government, and philanthropic organizations, has recently released "Preparing Students for the Next America: The Benefits of an Arts Education." This research bulletin offers a snapshot of how the arts support achievement in school, bolster skills demanded of a 21st century workforce, and enrich the lives of young people and communities.
From Patricia Cohen at The New York Times:
It is hard to imagine a business more custom-made for money laundering, with million-dollar sales conducted in secrecy and with virtually no oversight. What this means in practical terms is that “you can have a transaction where the seller is listed as ‘private collection’ and the buyer is listed as ‘private collection,’ ” said Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the asset forfeiture unit of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. “In any other business, no one would be able to get away with this.”